12th Suspect in Hacking Scandal Arrested in London

As the police in London questioned a 12th suspect in connection with Britain’s widening phone hacking scandal on Wednesday, Scotland Yard announced that Dick Fedorcio, its longtime director of public affairs, had been placed on extended leave until the criminal inquiries were concluded.

Mr. Fedorcio, an 11-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Service in London, was criticized by a parliamentary committee last month for hiring Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor at The News of the World, as a public relations consultant for the police from October 2009 until September 2010.

For much of last year, according to two executives at the newspaper’s parent company, Mr. Wallis was secretly serving two masters: Scotland Yard, which had closed its investigation of The News of the World phone hacking despite having evidence that the illegal activity was widespread; and his former bosses at the newspaper, who were eager for the investigation to remain closed.

Mr. Wallis, 60, was arrested on July 14 on suspicion of phone hacking and bribing police officers. He and his lawyer have not responded to repeated phone messages.

Mr. Miskiw, who was questioned at a London police station, could provide details about which executives at the tabloid and its parent company, News International, a British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, might have known about the illegal practices and how widespread they were.

Last month, a former reporter for The News of the World told The New York Times that Mr. Miskiw had helped him find a source he was seeking by using a cellphone number. He and another reporter said this was part of a practice known as pinging, in which the police used proprietary technology to pinpoint a person’s location based on cellphone towers. The reporter said the police were paid $500 for each request.

Scotland Yard has recently widened its hacking inquiry to include pinging.

Mr. Miskiw’s arrest and the announcement of Mr. Fedorcio’s extended leave suggest that as Scotland Yard is aggressively pursuing possible criminal activity at The News of the World, the police are also examining the long and cozy relationship between some of its own senior officials and the news media. Mr. Wallis, as much as anyone in the phone hacking scandal, exemplifies those overlapping relationships.

Late on the afternoon of May 26, 2010, Mr. Wallis, then working twice a month as a public relations consultant for Scotland Yard, visited 10 Downing Street for a drink with Andy Coulson, who was then the communications chief for Prime Minister David Cameron.

It appeared to be a routine social occasion between two old friends: Mr. Coulson had been the top editor at The News of the World from 2003 to 2007, and Mr. Wallis was his deputy.

The prime minister’s office declined to say what the two men discussed that afternoon. A spokesman said Mr. Wallis did not meet Mr. Cameron or anyone else in the government on that day.

But the meeting took place when there were questions about the illegal telephone hacking at the tabloid under Mr. Wallis’s and Mr. Coulson’s stewardship.

Working for newspapers including the Daily Star, Sun and Sunday People, he deployed an aggressive style and bold story ideas to propel himself to the top of the tabloid culture.

When Mr. Wallis emerged from his office, former reporters at The News of the World have said, they grabbed for their phones and chatted into dead air to avoid becoming one of his targets. They cringed, they said, when, after reading what they had written, Mr. Wallis would boom, “Can we say ...” followed by suggestions about how to torque up a story.

Mr. Wallis left The News of the World in 2009 to start his own media relations company, Chamy Media. In October 2009, Scotland Yard hired him on a contract worth about $3,260 a month. His hiring was approved by Mr. Fedorcio, who testified last month before Parliament’s Home Affairs select committee that he had not asked Mr. Wallis about phone hacking at the tabloid before hiring him to assist Scotland Yard’s press office.

Mr. Wallis helped write speeches for Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police commissioner who resigned last month, and gave strategic advice to John Yates, the assistant commissioner who also resigned last month. Just three months before Mr. Wallis was hired, Mr. Yates had decided not to reopen the police inquiry into phone hacking by The News of the World.

Mr. Wallis has known Mr. Yates since at least 2000, and the men saw each other two or three times a year. Mr. Yates called Mr. Wallis “a friend” and passed on the résumé of Mr. Wallis’s daughter to Scotland Yard’s human resources department so she could get a job.

He had also known Mr. Yates’s predecessor Andy Hayman, then an assistant police commissioner. While he was still working for The News of the World, Mr. Wallis met with Mr. Hayman and Mr. Coulson on April 25, 2006, for dinner at Soho House, a fashionable London club, according to diaries that a member of Parliament obtained from Scotland Yard. The dinner occurred while Mr. Hayman was running the initial inquiry into phone hacking at The News of the World.

While working for the police, Mr. Wallis maintained his ties to his former journalist colleagues. In the run-up to last year’s election, he gave informal, unpaid advice to Mr. Coulson before he had entered Downing Street, a spokesman for the Conservative Party said.

During this same period, Mr. Wallis was also reporting back to his former employer, News International, and Rebekah Brooks, who was then its chief executive, two executives with knowledge of the arrangement said.

“It looks very bad for the Met, but I am not that surprised, actually,” a 30-year veteran of Scotland Yard, recently retired, said about Mr. Wallis’s multiple roles. “The connections between all these people were so deep that I would have been more surprised if they had not tried to use them.”

Mr. Wallis had resigned his job at the police on Sept. 6, 2010, five days after an investigation into the hacking scandal appeared in The Times. At 10 p.m. that day, Mr. Fedorcio said, Mr. Wallis e-mailed him saying, “With what’s going on here, I fear this is going to embarrass you, and I don’t want to do that, so I wish to suspend the contract.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from London.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2011, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: High-Ranking Scotland Yard Official, Linked to Tabloid Editor, Is Put on Leave. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe